by Edna O'Brien
Ned stands, then walks, then stands again, flabbergasted. He has seen woods, he has even worked in woods, young woods, putting down spruces and the like, but he has never set foot in a place like this, the peacefulness of it, spooky, the way the trees seem to have stood there undisturbed for generations, have a greater claim on the place than either man or woman.
For the best part of a year he has been pestering Flossie, asking when can he go with him to gather the moss to line a grave, to learn the trade and be the one to pass it on. Flossie only does it for close friends or relatives or kids crashing on their way home from discos. But each time he has been turned down, Flossie in his gruff way saying, “You see I’m not Jimmy” and nothing more. Flossie learned the art from Jimmy, who learned it from a Cornish man, and the Cornish man having got it from a Breton, and the Breton from God knows where, maybe the Appalachian Way.
With Jimmy gone, Flossie preferred going alone, gathering the moss for those creatures that have meant something to him and now for the woman he scarcely knew but had a bond with, a bond never acknowledged by him and never ever by her.
A ghostlike mist hangs over and above the trees and above that, pockets of it run and frisk about, like the Pooka man playing hide and seek.
A hush and the two men advancing into the very heart of the forest, where even Ned has had the sense to pipe down. Flossie knows the trees with the best hangings, can already picture in his mind peeling back the beautiful copious strands, the green, the wetter green, and the orangey yellow, some meshy, some compact, some, even in winter, with little pinky purply flowers bedded in them. He already thinks what a beautiful sight it will make on the four walls of the woman’s grave. He has brought six black plastic bags, two for Ned and four for himself, and instructs the young boy not to rush it, the one thing he must not do is to rush it or the mosses will crumble, fall apart, and be useless. Slowly and with infinite care he begins to peel from the roots of the trees, the beech, the oak, and the elm, as Ned watches and follows, unfurling strand after strand, yet now and then Flossie has to shout, “Jesus, don’t rush it, you’re destroying it” and painstakingly they gather their crop and lay the strips along the boulders to dry off.
“’Tis a pity to be taking it,” Ned says, struck by the rich colors, now that the sun is half up.
“Ah, ’twill grow again … ’twill grow even better … that’s nature for you,” Flossie tells him.
Ned doesn’t know death, doesn’t want to know death, yet he is proud to be gathering a carpet that will be cut and trimmed and hung on lines of wire, then pegged to the grave to make it splendid. He knows their house with the rhododendrons and piles of trees around it, two avenues, the back avenue completely overgrown, a haunt for the courting couples. Once he saw the woman with a man’s hat on her, painting the bottom set of gates a silverish color.
“Was she a cousin of yours?” he asks.
“Mind your own feckin’ business,” he is told.
“Sorry, sorry,” Ned says, cowers, and after an awkward silence asks what color dead bones are and is told that they’re a dirty brown and all broken up, except for the skulls, the skulls stay intact, often three or four skulls in the same grave like they’re one family, still fighting it out.
“Did you know her?” Ned asks.
“Sort of” is the answer.
Only a kid when he saw her cross the water park and head for the river. He could tell just by the way she walked back and forth what was on her mind, pacing, not saying a word to him, eyeing him, wanting him gone out of there, to scoot it because of what she had come to do. Only a kid but he knew and he knew that she knew he knew, him standing there with the two big goose eggs that barely fitted into the palm of his hand, goose eggs that he had just stolen and she pacing and the river so wild and free and sporting, hungry for anything to be thrown into it, a stick, a rake, a person. She was white as a sheet and fuming at the gall he had by not moving off, her shoes in one hand and her stockings in the other and the waterfall a hundred yards away, spouting a yellow-green foam. He can still see it and hear it and all else, for it was something he had never forgotten nor ever would forget, the picture had never faded, the pallor of the woman, her eyes desperate, darting, wanting him gone because of what she had come to do and without the words begging him to show her a kindness by going away. But he didn’t go because he thought he shouldn’t go. Only a kid but he knew that he must stand his ground. The roar of the water so gushing, the power of it, the thick curdling surface ready to suck anything into itself and go its willful way. He stood his ground, he could still recall it, he with the two big white goose eggs in his hand, the one about to drop, and she with the saddest look he had ever seen and without the words imploring him to let her do what she had come to do. But he wouldn’t and he didn’t and after a long time or after what seemed a long time she walked away, away from the river and back up toward her own place, Rusheen. Not spoken of ever again. How could it. Seeing her at Mass and things over the years. He owed her the moss.
“You see I’m not Jimmy,” he said aloud, and the boy looks at him with a baleful look that is full of wonder.
The pelts of moss are drying out in the bit of sun, the sun’s warmth seeping into them, making the colors to quicken.
Cortege
THE WET GREEN WORLD into which the rain has poured and now sunshine lighting upon everything, fields of grass a pulsing green and rivers overflowing, swishing the shores, black-green at the bends, branches forking this way and that and where the odd leaf had clung on, brown and hunched like brown hunched birds, yet the crows swooping and joyous, the rained-on roads drying out, ranges of mountains in the distance a molded blue, at one with the horizon.
Bringing her home to the woodlands she knew.
The hearse is in front and the two mourning cars behind, having made their way cumbrously through the suburbs that sprawled out of Dublin and beyond, picking up a bit of speed on the motorway, then losing their bearings in the first big town because the eejit of a driver, a Dublin jackeen, took the wrong fork, took the Cork road rather than the Limerick one, and her father’s mood changing from one of lament to a scalding irritability. Her father, his friend Vinnie, and Eleanora are in the front car, Terence and Cindy behind, playing their car radio so loud that music could be heard when they came to a standstill in the market town enquiring if a hearse had been sighted, passing through.
* * *
“My mother is dead, my mother is dead,” she kept saying it in her numbed state, because it had not sunk in. It is outside of her, it is a figment, both because it is so sudden and because she cannot pinpoint the exact moment, it being such and such a time in one land and a different time on the clock of the other. It had happened in lost time.
The three previous days are jumbled, the hospital bed that she fled from, the famished blue vein of her mother’s elbow, the thick vinegary consistency of the rollmops herring, the motorcycle brigade, the tiny airport with its paltry souvenirs and Siegfried’s rueful goodbye, then the air journey through fog, trough after trough of fog, strapped into their seats and full of foreboding. Then arriving through her own front door to a ringing telephone, picking it up, she heard the voice and recognized it as being that of the sister with the steel-gray hair, telling her that her mother has died and the remains were being brought down home on the morrow. Coronary thrombosis—in other words, heart failure.
Her father in the front seat is lighting one cigarette from the other and repeating the same mournful sentence, his eyes welling with desolation and wrongedness, “I didn’t think she’d go so fast … I thought she’d pull through” and Vinnie doing his best to console him.
Vinnie is a big man, an ebullient man, keeps touching Con’s shoulder, points to houses, farms, and gateways that they pass, telling how such and such an owner came home from the States with a load of money and opened a takeaway joint and made another load of money, tastiest chicken in the land, but the health not too good, so money isn’t everything.
“So money isn’t everything,” he says and suddenly Con turns on him, not wishing to hear baloney about takeaway chicken, saying Christ Almighty, his wife is dead and will no one throw him a crumb of pity and then turning to his daughter asks where are her tears, where are the natural feelings for a mother.
“Ah, you poor man, you’re gutted … you’re absolutely gutted,” Vinnie says to Con, knowing how to humor him, having humored him all his life, in drink and out of drink, and nudging Eleanora, but for her father’s benefit tells it as he has told it numerous times: “I’d buy a horse for some big shot but your daddy would come with me to look it over … a genius with the horses … an absolute genius … he’d see the potential in one and he was never out … by God, he was never out, knacker, hunter, thoroughbred, he could tell what stuff was in them … he and me, by Christ, we made the jackpot for other men but not ourselves, but not ourselves … am I right, boss, am I right?”
“Oh, right as rain,” Con answers with a dreariness as Vinnie points to other farms owned now by foreigners, or Dublin people, solicitors and accountants, chaps with thesises, buying farms for their weekend shoots, aping the gentry of long ago.
It is Vinnie who suggests that they halt for a snack and Buss having beeped to the driver of the hearse waits, sees him reverse, then follows as they loop off the road and through a long winding avenue, dense with woodland on either side, big trees, leafless the upmost branches in lacy sway, the littler trees like foot soldiers with blousy buskins of ivy.
A girl meets them at the wide entrance door, her fingers twiddling delicately to wave them off. She is a young girl in a bright embroidered tunic, her high black boots draped with black fringing, the expression on her face apologetic—“We are very sorry … we cannot serve you … it is midwinter time”—and to emphasize it she points to the scattering of curled bronze leaves that have blown in under the heavy door and are strewn all over the great hall into which the travelers are looking with longing. It is empty except for a carving chair and a skeleton of bog oak, coal-black in color, on a center table, its limbs forking in all directions and to one side a huge copper gong lamentably mute.
Vinnie pleads with the girl, leads her around the side of the house where the hearse has been discreetly parked under a canopy of beeches, alludes to their grief, and wonders if she could see her way to make them a pot of tea.
They troop into the large dining room, the several tables laid with white cloths, mostly free of dishes except some cruets in which the damp salt has hardened. They sit in different places, the undertaker being a stranger to them, choosing to sit apart, and Buss being the last to have seen Dilly, simply repeating what a great lady she was. Terence and Cindy sit side by side holding hands, her father asking for a brandy and after much wrangling between him and his son, a tumbler of warm water and a tot of brandy are fetched.
From behind the folded shutters a butterfly, disturbed either by voices or the heat from her father’s cigarette, appears, opening and shutting its wings in a quick shuddery motion, the tortoiseshell brown unfolding to show a tinge of vivid orange, its suckers moving wildly as though indecision dogs it, but then nature or perhaps folly prevails and presently it does a giddy pirouette around the room and roams into the cold hallway.
The young girl has returned with two branches of laurel that she has just plucked and that she lays down before them in a gesture of welcome and perhaps commiseration.
“The kettle, it boils slow,” she tells them.
“And what might a beautiful girl like you be doing in the wilds of Ireland?” Vinnie asks her.
“It is poor wage in Latvia so I cannot live,” she answers.
“I bet you live now … I’d say the fellas are queuing up in the woods at night.”
“I am queen alone in my castle,” she says proudly and suddenly draws their attention to a herd of deer that have come to look, to enquire, the dusk of their shapes at one with the dusk of the shrubbery, curious and furtive, the shrubs not stirring and the animals not seeming to stir, just watching and then without warning and in a beautiful elongation, disappearing, apparition-wise.
“The gamekeeper he say they are getting too many … we shoot some,” the girl says.
“Which ones do you shoot?” Vinnie asks.
“The old ladies,” she says and giggles, then realizes the faux pas, puts her hand to her mouth, and does a little curtsy.
Cindy in a show of false sympathy asks Con if he would not be better sitting elsewhere as the sun is in his eyes and again he flares: “What blasted sun in my eyes? What would you know? An ignoramus,” at which Terence takes her arm and leads her solicitously away.
The girl has returned with the tray, different mugs chipped and putty-colored, apologizing for not being able to unlock the cabinet with its nice china. She has brought a cake of soda bread that is defrosting, the small beads of frost like hailstones on the yellowish crust. She does not sit with them, simply moves among them, remarks on the chilliness of the room, but brightens at the fact that they will open Easter week, except that she will no longer be queen alone in her castle.
As she wanders through the hall Eleanora hears her brother and his wife celebrate the fact that Rusheen is theirs, marveling at the good fortune that got him to the hospital in the nick of time, and the good friend Flaherty that had the acumen to tip him off. It was theirs on paper but it would always be her mother’s, and in time her mother’s ghost would demolish it, for the wrong done. She thinks of the three days ahead, mourners, endless pots of tea, endless plates of sandwiches, the low Mass, the high Mass, boats to the island grave, the first boat with the flowers, as is the tradition, the other boats following, and in her mind she goes upstairs to collect a few mementos, a gauze fan and from the blue room a bone box with the severed Bakelite head of an infant as ornamentation, in which there were old necklaces. In that instant it happens. It came first in her gut and thence to her thoughts and she knew before knowing. A tapestry bag belonging to her mother, with its birds and its griffins, seems similar to the one she had left in the porter’s keeping at the hospital. Then a terrifying tableau as she sees it being handed to her mother, the bent fingers rummaging and the words jumping out, as might an animal. She runs from the hall, through the porch, pulling back the heavy oak door, around to where the hearse stands so stately under a canopy of beeches, a few stray husks fallen onto the glass roof, her mother in her cerements inside the new, too-yellow coffin, all quiet, so quiet save for a stirring branch, and she kneels, praying that it be not so, prayers rapid, incoherent, and jumbled.
For the farewell, the Latvian girl escorts them, two metal ice buckets wedged into her arms that she bangs, the music loud, brazen, and tuneless, something reckless about it, breaking the veiled and somber hush.
Pat the Porter
THE PORTER WITH the croaky voice is on duty inside his glass cubicle and seeing Eleanora he runs, having waited, as he says, for the last four days to tell her, his hands raised helplessly and in futile anger: “Shure, he made her cry … her own son … it was him that caused her to fall.” Then he mashes her hands in sympathy. He saw it all, heard it all, with his own eyes, with his own ears, the poor woman sitting in the porch, by herself, minding her own business, waiting to be collected, her mind clear as a bell, going home for a private reason, except that there was an informer. Her son arriving, livid, ordering her down to bed, brooking no excuses, and a demon of a nurse in cahoots with him.
“Shure, that’s what did it,” he says and drags her into the inner hall to reenact the misfortune, them linking her, tugging, then he stops suddenly on the tiled spot where she turned round and saw the driver from home and bolted, but too hastily and in her flounder fell; pandemonium, bells ringing, nurses flying it, and the poor helpless woman collapsing, then lifted onto the wheelchair.
He tells her that wicked though that was, it was not the worst moment, the worst was when they tripped her up, caught her out in a lie, and she denying it stoutly, then her son throwing down
the gauntlet, asking her was it not so that she had confided to a young nurse about changing her will and caught red-handed the creature blushed having to own up to it, pleading to be forgiven, begging him to let her go home anyhow, will or no will, if only to see the place, if only to walk around it, because Father Time was winding down her clock. But they wouldn’t. And they didn’t.
“Shure, that’s what did it,” he said, proud that he was there to be a witness but vexed that he failed to prevent it, staring with pale, watering eyes.
“The bag I left with you … could we get it?” Eleanora says gesturing to the glass booth and he not registering the question. She takes him by surprise as she goes there, into his little bivouac, where none are allowed.
“A bag with bone handles … it must be here,” she says, rooting in corners, in which there are stacks of newspapers, boxes, his raincoat, and a man’s black hardhat.
“Ah, I sent that back up … I’m never here of a Tuesday,” he says, proud of the fact of having remembered but shocked by the sudden eruption in her voice.
“Find it … find it,” she is close to screaming, when to placate her, as he thinks, he produces the death notice that her brother had in the paper, and the sickening opening words: “To our darling Mammy who will be sorely missed.”
“Where did you put it?” she asks, her face now only a few inches from his, his fluster, his tremor.
Then it dawns on him and he smiles, a baleful childlike smile. He has remembered.
“I sent it up … little Aoife brought it to your mother … you see I’m never here of a Tuesday,” he says, at which she exclaims at the bungle, his denseness, his stupefaction, telling her the same useless thing over and over again, about never being there of a Tuesday.
She is no longer listening.
She has fled from that hall to the inner hall, down the corridor, heading for the ward on the third floor, where she last saw her mother and where she pictures the bag at the foot of the wrought-iron empty bed, with a ghastly white coverlet over it.